Deeplinks Blog posts about Law Enforcement Access

The FBI wants to ensure everyday people can't use strong encryption. For over nine months FBI Director James Comey has been pushing the FBI's twenty-year-old talking points about why he wants to reduce the security in your devices, rather than help you increase it. Director Comey will appear at two hearings about cryptography on July 8: The first in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee, followed by another in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

A pair of bills aimed at reforming the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) were introduced in the United States Congress today. The bills, championed by Senators Leahy (D-Vt.) and Lee (R-Utah) and Representatives Yoder (R-Ks.) and Polis (D-Co.) focus on clarifying that the government must obtain a warrant before looking at email and other private online messages. EFF strongly supports this common sense reform.

And we're not the only ones. The bills are being supported by a strong bipartisan coalition with over 220 cosponsors in the House.

2014 has seen a flurry of events surrounding the issues of privacy and security when it comes to mobile devices. Here are some highlights.

EFF started the year by releasing HTTPS Everywhere on Firefox for Android. Before, HTTPS Everywhere could only protect web browsing on desktop platforms, but with the release of HTTPS Everywhere for Firefox for Android, that same protection became available for Android devices as well.

Recently, FBI Director James B. Comey, along with several government officials, have issued many public statements regarding their inability to catch criminals due to Apple and Google offering default encryption to their consumers.

FBI Director James Comey gave a speech yesterday reiterating the FBI's nearly twenty-year-old talking points about why it wants to reduce the security in your devices, rather than help you increase it. Here's EFF's response: